Greece urges creditors to compromise as IMF payment date nears

Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis arrives to attend a central committee of leftist Syriza party in Athens on Saturday. Varoufakis said yesterday on BBC’s Andrew Marr Show that his government had met the euro area and IMF three-quarters of the way, and that it was up to creditors to cover the remainder.Bloomberg/AthensGreece urged the country’s creditors to compromise on demands to break an impasse over the release of funds for its cash-strapped economy as a deadline neared for payments due next month to the International Monetary Fund.A day after Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said Greek society can’t absorb any more austerity measures, Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis said his government has met the euro area and IMF three-quarters of the way, and that it’s up to creditors to cover the remainder.“Greece has made enormous strides reaching a deal, it is now up to the institutions to do their bit,” Varoufakis said yesterday on BBC’s Andrew Marr Show. “It is not in their interests as our creditors that the cow that produces the milk should be beaten into submission to the extent that the milk will not be enough for them to get their money back.”German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande last week gave Tsipras until the end of May to reach a deal on its aid program, including economic policy changes demanded by Greece’s creditors.As time runs short, the Greek government has to pay monthly salaries and pensions by May 29 and repay about €300mn ($330mn) to the IMF a week later.German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, meanwhile, signalled there isn’t much wiggle room after Tsipras’s government committed to policy changes in return for aid in a euro-area accord on February 20.“That is the condition for completing the current program,” Schaeuble said in a Deutschlandfunk radio interview aired Sunday. “The problems are rooted in Greece. And now Greece does have to fulfill its commitments.”Some members of Tsipras’s Syriza party advocate defaulting on loans rather than backing down from the anti-austerity policies that swept it to power in January even if that leads the country out of the euro.Greece doesn’t have the money, and won’t pay what it owes the IMF in June, Interior Minister Nikos Voutsis said in a Mega TV interview yesterday. Spiegel Online on April 1 cited Voutsis as saying Greece should delay an April 9 payment to the fund, which was made.“We’ve done remarkably well for an economy that doesn’t have access to the money markets to meet our obligations,” Varoufakis said. “At some point we will not be able to do it.”A Greek exit from the euro is just a matter of time and wouldn’t lead to the breakup of monetary union, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan told Het Financieele Dagblad in an interview published Saturday. An exit could make the euro stronger, billionaire investor Warren Buffett said in an interview in the Euro-am-Sonntag newspaper.“Once you are in a monetary union, getting out of it is catastrophic,” Varoufakis said.“It would be a disaster for everyone involved. It would be a disaster primarily for the Greek social economy but it would also be the beginning of the end of the common currency project in Europe, whatever some analysts might be saying.”Varoufakis admits to taping Eurogroup meetingGreek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis yesterday admitted he had recorded a eurozone finance ministers meeting and criticised media for reporting “lies and innuendos” on what transpired at that April 24 Eurogroup gathering. The outspoken minister told the New York Times Magazine last week he had taped the confidential meeting in Riga, drawing criticism that he was undermining Greece’s efforts to secure aid from lenders. “In the absence of minutes, I often record my interventions and responses on my mobile phone, especially when I ad lib them,” Varoufakis said in his blog and to Britain’s BBC, adding that he used the recordings to help prepare briefings for the Greek cabinet. “I did the same in the Riga Eurogroup meeting and, afterwards, back in Athens, used that recording to work on my brief to my colleagues,” he wrote. Since assuming his post in January, Varoufakis has annoyed many eurozone colleagues due to his brash style and sharp-tongued barbs against creditors at a time when Greece needs their help to avert bankruptcy. Eurogroup rules do not explicitly prohibit participants from recording talks as long as the contents are kept confidential. But the disclosure prompted howls of disbelief from Greek media and the opposition who said that secretly recording his peers might undercut Greece’s efforts to build alliances.  A columnist for Greek newspaper Eleftheros Typos wrote: “We all should care that the country’s finance minister, at a most crucial moment, states without shame that he secretly recorded all dialogues and discussions at the last Eurogroup in Riga, which was his Waterloo.” Observers of the meeting in the Latvian capital said he appeared isolated and noted that he did not attend a finance ministers’ dinner in the evening. Varoufakis said media reports that fellow ministers had called him a “time waster”, “gambler” and “amateur” were untrue.  Varoufakis said he had not leaked the recordings and had fully respected the meeting’s confidentiality, even when provoked by the media. “I stood firm against the torrent of lies that flowed for weeks like an out of control sewer. I desisted all provocation and refused to divulge anything of what was said in the meeting,” he said in his blog. He called for minutes to be taken at important meetings. “Perhaps it is time we became a little more sceptical about the journalism we rely upon as citizens. And perhaps we should query European institutions in which decisions of monumental importance are made, on behalf of Europe’s citizenry, but in which minutes are neither taken or published.”